60
PARTISAN REVIEW
answering ifs phone.
It
was during this uneasy period that Stalin warned
a gathering of film workers: "Soviet power expects successes from yoU!"100
At length, on March
23, 1938,
the Council of People's Commissars appointed
a receiver for the bankrupt industry in the form of the All-Union Committee
on Cinema. Precisely the same task faces the Committee in
1938
as faced
Shumiatsky in
1930:
to rationalize, plan, economize, and, above all, speed
up production. So far there are no indications it will be any more successful,
since, as is hardly surprising, there is no evidence that the Committee's
political and esthetic line differs in the slightest .from that of 'the former
chief.' The Kremlin's more naive apologists have convinced themselves
that Shumiatsky single-handed and contrary to the orders of the Kremlin
sabotaged the Soviet cinema; they expect great things of this latest replacing
of Tweedledum by Tweedledee. A few straws already in the wind indicate
how much may be expected ... For
1938
the Committee has announced
the modest total of
51
feature pictures. "The larse number of films devoted
to the problems of Soviet patriotism, defense and the struggle against
Fascist agents is explained by the fact that these problems are of vital interest
at the present time."101 . .. When Petrov has finished the second part of
Peter I,
he is to make a film of Alexis Tolstoy'S latest contribution to the
Stalin Myth:
Grain,
a novel about Stalin's one exploit during the Civil War,
the defense of Tsaritsyn (now Stalingrad) ... Friedrich Wolf's anti-Nazi
play,
Professor Mamlock,
is to be "broadened" to make a Popular Front
film. . . The Committee has issued a plea to writers for more scenarios on
contemporary Soviet life... Ermler's latest film,
The Great Citizen,
shows
Kirov struggling against the Trotsky-Zinoviev gang (who try to restore
capitalism) in the
1925-27
period. "The scenario for
The Great Citizen
was completed May,
1936,
but filming did not begin until late in
1937,
since the Trotskyist-Bukharinist wreckers in the management of the Lenin–
grad
Film
Studios sought to prevent its production in every way. "102 Thus
Moscow News
compounds unreality on unreality: an imaginary group of
Trotskyist-Bukharinists sabotage a fictional account of what they didn't do
ten years ago.
250
copies of Ermler's film have been sent into the rural
districts . . . Alexandrov has released a musical comedy about the new
Moscow-Volga canal.
It
is called
Volga-Volga.
But there is one significant point about the reorganization. The head
of the new Committee on Cinema, and Shumiatsky's successor as movie czar,
is Semyon Dukelsky, who has been described as " a tough-minded young
man" who "came to the motion picture industry straight from the NKVD,
or political police."I03
Moscow News
further reports he was appointed "to
introduce firm Bolshevik order" into the cinema. With the arrival of the
NKVD on the scene, the degradation of the cinema under the present
regime may be said to have reached its logical and inevitable conclusion.
